‘They are killing each other’: Western weapons for Syrian rebels will intensify war

Afshin Rattansi is a journalist, author of “The Dream of the Decade – the London Novels” and an RT Contributor. Afshin Rattansi began his journalism career on The (London) Guardian in the late 1980s as one of the newspaper’s youngest ever columnists. He went on to work for Britain’s Channel 4, BBC, Al Jazeera Arabic, CNN International and Bloomberg Television and many other media. In the run-up to the Lehman Brothers crash of 2008, he published a collection of four of his novels as “The Dream of the Decade – The London Novels.”
As US pressure increased on Iran, Afshin moved to Tehran to anchor the news on the new satellite TV channel, Press TV which was later banned in Britain. He set up Alternate Reality Productions in London in 2010 making Double Standards, a comedy satire show as well as other TV news commissions. His writing has also appeared in the New Statesman; Counterpunch; The Oldie; Plays and Players; Mitchell Beazley’s Encyclopaedia of 21st Century; The Journal of the British Astronomical Association; Association of Lloyd's Members Journal; Critical Quarterly; Makers of Modern Culture (Routledge, 2007); “Brought To Book” (Penguin, 1994); Flaunt; Attitude. He is a founder member of the Frontline Club in London and he won the Sony Award for outstanding contribution to international media in 2002.

The US decision to arm the Syrian rebels fighting government troops has sparked feuds among various rebel factions dominated by radical Islamist fighters. RT contributor Afshin Rattansi warns against the move, as internal schisms among the rebels deepen.

A power struggle may also be brewing in the rebels’ ranks:
Fighters from the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front have reportedly
assassinated a large number of officers of the Free Syrian Army.

RT:The Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front is now said to
be targeting Free Syrian Army (FSA), but these two share a common
goal – to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad. Is there some sort
of power struggle we are seeing within the rebel ranks?

Afshin Rattansi: The rebel ranks were in Istanbul
recently, where they could make no type of agreement between
themselves. Now they are actually killing each other. This power
struggle has been going on for months and months.

And presumably President Obama and the NATO powers are saying
that they will give weapons to the Free Syrian Army. Well, if
Al-Nusra Front is murdering members of the Free Syrian Army, then
presume they take some of those arms and use them. Disunity in
the rebel ranks is high, and is now extending to attacking Kurds
in the northern part of Syria.

RT:Reports say that many FSA fighters are leaving more
modern brigades for hard-line groups. What are the dangers of
that, and why are they doing it?

AF: The dangers are everywhere to be seen in neighboring
Iraq and Lebanon, as the Al-Nusra Front becomes the lead faction
in the opposition. No amount of arming the so-called ‘moderate
rebels’ is going to work against the hundreds or thousands,
millions or billions – we don’t know – coming from Qatar and
Saudi Arabia, the American allies in the Persian Gulf.

So, the dangers are everywhere to be seen. Another danger is the
blowback that is occurring even now, with some of those militants
returning to their home countries in Europe and perhaps to the US
to fight their jihad on European and American soil.

RT:Any clearer about who or what is actually making up
the FSA?

AF: The Free Syrian army seems to have deposed some of the
initial leaders, but rather like the pre-Iraq-War time, we don’t
really know. It isn’t stopping the Americans. They seem to know
exactly who the Free Syrian Army is, and they have 2,000 marines
over the Jordanian border putting in Patriot missiles and getting
ready for war. They were flying F-16s over the past 48 hours.

France does not seem to know who the FSA is either, as Paris is
saying “no more arms, no more weapons, until we find out who the
personnel really are in this rebel movement.”

RT:What is the right way forward here with the rebels
calling on Western backers to send in weapons?

AF: The right way of going about it in Syria is keeping
money on the humanitarian groups that are going to help the
refugees. The US should be bombing Syria not with weapons, but
with airlifts of medicine and urgent medical care for all of
these millions of refugees.

Syria already had a refugee crisis in the fallout of the Iraq
war, and it has its own one now. So the way forward is to pour
humanitarian aid into the country, and of course get those talks
going in Geneva. Hopefully, all sides will be talking soon
without the preconditions of this loose coalition of rebels.